Of Grandstanding And Misconceptions
by Magery
Summary: Raynare isn't a Fallen Angel. There's no such thing. She's just a teenaged girl with delusions of grandeur—and Issei is her long-suffering boyfriend.


**This is the only Issei/Raynare I ever plan to write. You're welcome.**

* * *

Hyoudou Issei was on a date.

This, in and of itself, was not anything unusual.

(Well, in this universe anyway).

He'd managed to hold onto a steady girlfriend for over a year now. She was small, cute, and often mistaken for a child by people who'd stare at him suspiciously on the street—even though he was younger than she was! It just wasn't fair. He'd lost all the prestige of being in a relationship with an older woman, simply because she didn't look like one. That might have bothered him if, well, there'd been any prestige in the relationship regardless, except maybe when people thanked him for doing the world a favour by taking her off the market.

He often dreamed about punching those people, with a shining crimson gauntlet on his fist and the roar of a dragon in his mind. His girlfriend was, well, _weird_ , but there was nothing wrong with that, and he'd fight anyone who said otherwise.

And speaking of weird, he wasn't quite sure why she'd decided to lead him to a water fountain at midnight to end their date, but maybe—maybe this was the day. The big one. Where she'd say that her mother was out on a business trip and there was nobody home. Where she'd wink over her shoulder with those bright, amethyst eyes and beckon him along. Issei didn't want to get his hopes up, but, well, some things a man couldn't _not_ think of.

"Ise-kun, would you listen to my wish?" Amano Yuuma—his girlfriend, black hair fluttering dramatically in the breeze—said, smiling. It was a very cute smile. Issei had empirical evidence of that. _Everyone_ said Yuuma's smile was cute, at least until she opened her mouth. Then it just became scary.

Internally, he sighed. He knew that tone of voice. "Of course, Yuuma-chan! What is your wish?"

"Would you die for me?"

Issei blinked. That was new. "I mean, probably? Like, if there was a speeding car, and it was going to hit both of us, I'd definitely push you out of the way instead of trying to save myself."

"I _said_ ," Yuuma said, stabbing him in the stomach, "will you die for me?"

Issei looked at his blushing girlfriend, and down at the pink-painted ruler jabbing into his buttoned-up blazer. Then he looked up at the night sky and the stars strewn across it.

What, exactly, had he done to deserve this?

(Perhaps it was best not to answer that).

"Oh, I am slain," he said, slumping to the ground and probably staining his clothes with dust and dirt. The things he did for her. Though he _could_ see up Yuuma's skirt from here, so it wasn't all bad. Her legs were lovely. "Why has this fiendish maiden so cruelly betrayed my pure and innocent heart?"

"You were a threat to our organisation because of what your soul carries." Yuuma tried to sound imperious, even cruel, but her voice was naturally pitched as high as she wasn't—and she was still blushing and trying not to laugh. "Blame God—he was the one that put that thing in you!"

She poked him with the ruler again, on his upper arm. He could still see the faded patches where she'd ripped off the Hello Kitty stickers that had been there when she'd bought it.

"Right there. You had a shard of the Lord's soul inside you, Ise-kun. I'm sorry, but I couldn't let you live when Lord Azazel told me about it." Lord Azazel, of course, was her pet snake. Strictly speaking she should have called him Lord Lucifer, but when he'd raised that, she'd gone off on a half-an-hour rant about 'cursed Devils' and how they were 'trying to stamp out the Grigori', which he suspected was some sort of metaphor for the way Gremory-senpai's Occult Research Club had taken over from Yuuma's own Supernatural Studies Group at the start of the semester.

"What would this shard have let me do that was so dangerous?" He probably wasn't doing a very good job of pretending to be dead, but it was quite difficult considering he had never, in fact, actually been dead. And Yuuma's face when somebody actually _listened_ to her… well, there was a reason everyone agreed she was cute. Her joy warmed him like a sunrise. Which was good, because the earth was _cold_ , and if he laid here for much longer he'd start to shiver.

"Um," Yuuma said, "I—I hadn't got that far yet."

Issei tapped his chin. "Maybe it would let me double my power whenever I activated it?"

Yuuma scoffed. "Pah! That wouldn't be a threat. Compared to an insect like you, my power is unfathomable! I'm a hundred where you're a one!"

That, Issei could agree with. In his eyes, Yuuma was a solid ten out of ten—beautiful, funny, surprisingly kind when she liked you, and always there to listen and care—whereas Issei sometimes despaired if he even broke zero. It was a hard life, being a pervert, and _no he didn't mean it that way damnit_.

"Okay, something else then." He liked that doubling theme, though. Maybe—oh, of course. "What if it _kept_ doubling my power? Like, I start out a one, then I'm a two, then a four, then an eight, then a 16, and so on and so forth?"

"Then you'd be stronger than me by the seventh time." Yuuma was good at math. Geometry especially—which sounded strange until you realised it was because of how many hours she'd spent calculating the precise arrangements of the hand-drawn ritual circles that decorated the walls of her bedroom. They were quite pretty. "Yes. That would work. Good idea, Ise-kun!"

She punched her own hand in emphasis.

"I'm glad my dying words helped you solve your problem, Yuuma-chan," Issei said dryly. "Can I finish falling off this mortal coil, yet? I've got a Heaven to get to. I heard there was this adorable angel who lived there, and I want to meet her. I think her name was Raynare?"

" _Where did you find that na_ —I mean, uh, that is," Yuuma looked panicked, "I—I placed a curse on you, Ise-kun! You can't ever go to Heaven. Your soul will be stuck here on Earth forever."

He was pretty sure he heard her whisper "with me." at the end there, but as glorious as the teasing might have been, he'd already bullied her enough with the Raynare joke. She must have forgotten that she'd left her diary open in front of him a couple of times and, well, he wasn't _that_ good a person. He'd flicked through it here and there. Her list of favourite baby names had been as eclectic and unusual as she was: off the top of his head, he could only remember Raynare, Jehiel, and Ruri, but at least one of them had been written in hieroglyphs.

"That doesn't sound so bad." Okay, maybe he hadn't _quite_ bullied her enough. "But if I'm going to die, shouldn't someone try to save me? Like in all those romances, where the assassin has to kill their target, but they can't do it because they fall in love with them, and they fake the murder to live happily ever after? But everyone has to _believe_ it wasn't fake—even the one being murdered—so it's touch-and-go for a while until the assassin manages to get them to a healer?"

Never let it be said that Issei did not know his girlfriend well. Yuuma's eyes lit up, and she almost collapsed in her haste to fall to his side. Her hair draped across his chest, and her perfume smelled of lilac. She started chanting in what was probably supposed to sound like some long-dead language known only to gods and sages—but he'd watched Bleach with her, and just translating Don Kanonji's speeches into English wasn't enough to fool him, no matter how odd the emphases she put on random syllables.

Still, he had a part to play. He pretended to convulse a couple of times, and if that meant he incidentally ended up holding her hand, well, _she_ wasn't doing anything about it. "What's going on? I feel—cold. So cold."

He wasn't even lying. The wind was wild enough to occasionally blow drops of water from the fountain far enough out to splatter across his face, and _holy crap_ they were freezing.

"I'm extracting your essence," she said, and he was _pretty_ sure she didn't mean it as lewdly as it might be taken when she was bending over him and running her other hand over his chest, "to prove to Lord Azazel that I have slain you, as instructed. So just be quiet and die, you slug!"

Yuuma leaned down further to whisper in his ear. Her breath was warm against his neck. "I'm actually paralysing you, Ise-kun, so you'll survive until I can save you, even though everyone else will think you're dead."

"Are you going to be my nurse?" he whispered back. "I'd like that."

Yuuma glared at him.

She also didn't say _no_.

Eventually, she stood, wiggling her fingers in his direction. Issei had never really associated dark magic with jazz hands, but you learned something new every day.

"Shazam!" Okay, so now this was a DC crossover as well. Fair enough, he guessed.

Issei exhaled dramatically. "Tell… Yuuma-chan… I love her…"

Then he closed his eyes.

He felt a soft pressure on his lips. It tasted like coffee and girl.

Well, he might not have received the invitation he'd been hoping for—but this, he thought blissfully, this was _perfectly fine_.

* * *

A few days later, Issei was puzzling over a… puzzling pattern. Okay, so he wasn't that good with words, sue him.

Ever since their last date, Yuuma had started ignoring him. She wouldn't talk to him—in person, over the phone, or even through texts—and in fact wouldn't even _look_ at him. At school, even though their desks were right next to one another, she never once offered to help him out with math, and at lunch she went and sat with her sister instead of him. Her _sister_.

Akeno-senpai had been… unamused. The two of them shared a father, but not a mother, and given that Yuuma was the younger of the two of them, well—that should explain the drama sufficiently. Issei was almost too surprised by the fact Akeno hadn't driven Yuuma from the room in tears to remember to be hurt that his girlfriend apparently wanted to exist anywhere else than in his vicinity.

He didn't even know what he'd done! The date had been fine—great, even. He and Yuuma had made out for a while, and then he'd walked her home before heading back to his place. By the time he'd arrived, it was almost one o'clock in the morning, but his parents didn't care. They'd abandoned hope for so long that he'd ever land a girl—or boy, once his less conservative mother had brought his father around to the possibility, probably out of desperation—that as long as he said he was with Yuuma, he could practically get away with anything.

It had never really been tempting to abuse the privilege, because, well, most of the abuses he could think of were to do with spending time with Yuuma in the first place, and that was like stealing something you'd just been offered for free.

Anyway, point was, he'd gone to bed after a wonderful day and woken up to a Yuuma who wouldn't even acknowledge the fact she wasn't acknowledging him. It was like she was pretending he was…

He slapped himself in the head. Once. Twice. Three times. It got him kicked out of class for five minutes for being a disruption, but that was what he deserved for being an idiot.

Yuuma was treating him like he was _dead_.

He really should have seen that coming.

Now, he could just let her play out the full story until she inevitably returned with her cunning plan to revive him without any of her 'faction' noticing—her faction being her snake, Lord Azazel, and the three hand-stitched dolls she'd made and called Kalawarner, Mittelt, and Dohnaseek respectively—and they could get back together. Except, honestly, he missed her. The bright bubble of her laugh, the delicate warmth of her arms around his shoulders when she hugged him, and the haughty tilt of her chin to hide, poorly, a silly grin when he complimented her too effusively.

(Those who once knew him might have been surprised he hadn't mentioned her breasts. And maybe when they'd started going out, he would have. But they'd been together a while now, and honestly, however intense his attraction to her body, it was her soul he'd fallen in love with).

So that wasn't an option. No, Issei thought, clenching his fist in determination, that wasn't an option at all. He was going to get his girlfriend back, and damn any imaginary group of fallen angels that stood in his way, even if she was one of them!

He'd nearly rushed out of the school before he'd remembered class hadn't actually ended—and that, furthermore, Yuuma was _in_ that class.

An hour or so later, the day finally ended, and Issei sprinted to his locker. There was no point confronting Yuuma at school, it'd be embarrassing for both of them; as much as he liked to tease her, there was a limit to how public he'd allow it to get. She didn't need that. No—he'd just follow her when she left, and… probably start thinking up a plan along the way, because he'd just realised he didn't have one.

When he got to the gate, it was to see Yuuma leaving, hand-in-hand with another girl he couldn't recognise from this far away, except that she went to their school by her uniform. They disappeared around a corner, and Issei had a brief moment of panic—he couldn't let them get away, but he couldn't let Yuuma see him either, or else it might spoil whatever _she_ was planning. So where would she be going?

Thankfully, that was a question with an easy answer. There was an abandoned church near her house, which she'd claimed as her 'base', where she could conduct arcane rituals (geometry homework), hide from agents of the Pope (her mother), and plot against the Devil menace (Gremory-senpai). Considering Yuuma had turned onto the street that it was—a long way—down, that was likely where she was going.

And so, about twenty minutes later, Issei found himself standing at the gate leading into the church's gardens. No doubt Yuuma needed more time to prepare, so he leaned against a moss-encrusted pillar and pulled out his phone. Her birthday was coming up, and so were the holidays—the perfect opportunity to combine both, since there were a couple of old Shinto shrines you could buy tours to nearby. If he knew anything about Yuuma, it's that she'd jump at the chance to visit them. Probably to try and 'seek out spirits to bind to her cause', but considering she spent most of her time looking for spirits in beautiful paintings, he suspected an ulterior motive.

He was just opening the page that listed the tour dates when he heard a very high, very feminine shriek from inside the church.

Naturally, he rushed straight in. The whole place was old and crumbling—what if something had fallen on Yuuma? Or even the other girl she'd dragged along?

That was how he found Asia Argento, the Italian transfer student, splayed out on the wooden altar, with both of Yuuma's hands up her shirt.

"H-Hyoudou-san!?"

"Ise-kun!?"

He blinked.

"I can explai—I mean, hah, you fool, you're too late!" Yuuma's voice was a strange mix between panicked and bombastic. "Soon I will extract this girl's power, and then the whole world will tremble to know me!"

Issei held up a firm hand. "Stop right there, Yuuma-chan."

He marched down the row of dusty pews, feet furious against the floor—and then carefully sat in the closest pew, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward for a better view. The way Argento was arching her back into Yuuma's grip, a slight flush across her cheeks, was practically everything he wanted out of life. "Carry on."

Perhaps he should offer some context. Yuuma, some time ago, had decided that Issei carried the blood of dragons in his veins. Dragons were mighty and powerful beings who embodied the glories of the earth and sky, who deserved worship and tribute and praise. This meant, naturally, that Issei deserved a harem.

(Yes, he was still as bemused as you are).

As such, she had started trying to make him one.

The only problem was that she was _incredibly bad at it_. Yuuma managed to combine a talent for accidental seduction with an eye for girls who liked girls—or, in the case of the one man she'd tried to include for equality's sake, boys who didn't like girls _or_ boys—so rather than developing crushes on Issei, they generally developed crushes on _her_. She'd left a trail of half-broken hearts in her wake, and to make matters worse he was pretty sure _she_ liked some of them more than she was willing to admit to her boyfriend.

Issei had, before he'd started going out with Yuuma, actually wanted a harem. It had seemed like a pretty cool dream for someone who firmly thought he'd never have _anyone_ —if one girl was just as unrealistic as ten, why not hope for the latter? Then, of course, he'd met that one girl, and found he was quite happy with her. Point was, he thought it would be a little bit hypocritical of him to demand that his girlfriend remain devoted to him alone when he'd spent a decent portion of his teenaged years to date fantasising about doing the exact opposite himself.

No: if Yuuma wanted to share her affection around a little, it wasn't going to be Issei who stood in her way. His only stipulation was that she warn him first—which, in this case, she hadn't. No matter. They could talk about it later, when she was allowing him _to_ talk to her.

Yuuma smiled at his words and returned her attention to the girl, whose expression was as confused as if she'd just walked into a lecture on proving the Kolmogorov axioms. His girlfriend started cackling madly and then spoke. "I finally have it! The supreme power! With this, I can become the greatest Fallen Angel, and pay back all those who have looked down on me!"

Argento blinked bamboo-green eyes, tilted her head up from where it lay against the altar to look where Yuuma's fingers were, and then raised a meek hand. "Amano-sama, those are just my rings."

Indeed, Argento was wearing a pair of silver rings on a necklace around her neck, which finished under the neckline of her uniform shirt. Yuuma had them clasped between her fingers.

"Rings? You silly, deluded fool!" Somehow, the floor did not collapse beneath the irony. "This is the physical form of the Sacred Gear, Twilight Healing, the crystallisation of the miracle of rejuvenation when Jesus Christ healed Bartimaeus of his blindness! Once I have ripped it out of your soul, I will be unstoppable!"

Ah, healing. So _that's_ how she intended to do it.

"But first," Yuuma said, "I must crush this foul interloper!"

She punctated her words with a sharp gesture at Issei. Unfortunately, it was a sharp gesture with the hand she'd used to hold the rings, which—while she _did_ remember to let go, at least—meant her hand sort of… well, let's just say the remaining buttons on Argento's shirt weren't all that sturdy to begin with.

Issei identified a somewhat-disappointing lack of frilly lace—turns out schoolgirls did not, as a rule, wear lewd underwear about their daily business—before he looked away. Watching Yuuma play with Argento was one thing. Staring at another half-naked girl right in front of her was another thing entirely.

"I'm so sorry, Asia-chan!" Yuuma could, in fact, break character when she needed to. "Here, you can have mine."

The problem was that her _normal_ character wasn't any more sensible than her delusions.

Issei heard some terribly-tempting rustling, but didn't eve—okay, yeah, he didn't believe himself either. In his defense, he made sure not to turn enough to see Argento as well as Yuuma, but when the girl you've been dating for a full year is stripping her own shirt behind you, you're practically _obligated_ to look. Certainly Yuuma, on the couple of peeks he took, was undressing and dressing a little more slowly than she really needed to.

"There, all better—don't you think so, Ise-kun?" He looked up and sideways, for real this time, and saw Argento wearing Yuuma's top, which fit her rather well, and Yuuma not really bothering to drape the ruins of Argento's own all that modestly around her. "Ise-kun?"

Oh, right. He slanted his eyes from the flare of Yuuma's bare waist to her face. " _Much_ better."

"Um," Argento said, her index fingers pressed tightly together in front of her chest, "what are you going to do about _your_ clothes, Amano-sama?"

"A great Fallen Angel such as I has no need for clothes!" Yuuma said. "I could walk down the streets wearing only a set of straps and be worshipped by every pair of eyes that saw me!"

 _Her_ eyes, however, betrayed a faint nervousness at the thought. Thankfully, Issei was way ahead of her on that one.

He finished unbuttoning his own shirt, stood up, and held it out to Yuuma with a flourished bow. "Oh great Yuuma-sama, your eternal servant humbly presents an offering. Though your visage is a blessing upon all those who gaze upon it, we lowly humans are not worthy to see it. Please, take this to protect your divine form from our crude regard."

"V-Very well," Yuuma said, apparently having no desire to hide _her_ crude regard given how she was looking at him with red-soaked cheeks; keeping up with her every time she decided to gallivant halfway across the city required Issei to keep a certain level of fitness, and it showed, "it is good to see that you know your place, dog."

She took his shirt and put it on. A certain, low triumph filled him at the sight, but that wasn't the point. He didn't want Yuuma walking around in more revealing clothes than she'd usually wear to the beach—and, more importantly, _Yuuma_ didn't want to do it either. He could tell. Better that Issei face the embarrassment and censure than Yuuma, however much the situation owed itself to her mistakes rather than his.

"Thank you, mighty angel," he said, as if he was the one being done a favour.

Argento-san smiled at the sight. Whyever for, Issei wasn't sure. He was just being a decent boyfriend.

"You are welcome," Yuuma said, and then marched over to grab his hand. "Come, servants! It is clear we will have to resume this ritual elsewhere. This place smells like bad spirits!"

Issei was half-expecting a _Bohahaha!_ at the end, but it seemed it was not to be.

Yuuma dragged him over to Argento, took _her_ hand as well, and started toward the wide oak door. They briefly had to reorient themselves to fit through the gap between the pews—the old, half-rotted rug wasn't quite large enough for three people to pass abreast—but eventually they made it out of the church.

And thus, Issei found himself walking the streets of Kuoh, shirtless for all to see, with one cute girl obviously wearing a shirt far too long for her having eventually pressed herself completely against his side, and another cute girl holding _that_ cute girl's hand while carrying her ripped shirt, on the way to one of their houses.

Truly, there was no better universe than this.

* * *

 **All blame may be directed to Erebeal of Sufficient Velocity, who, as well as drawing some lovely art for _Of Gods And Monsters_ a fair few arcs ago, recently suggested the concept of a chuunibyou Raynare. I was idly thinking about it today, and wrote this entire thing in the stretch of about six hours, which is frankly miraculous for me. Inspiration, eh? **

**I make no pretensions that Issei is more than vaguely in-character. Or Raynare, for that matter. That's part of the point.**


End file.
